AppCloud

Background

The consultancy market for application development has undergone major changes in recent years and the need for new delivery models has forced its way.

Factors such as "insourcing" at larger companies, technological development, the emergence of no/low-code solutions and a greater focus on time consumption and costs in deliveries have guided the development.

In Apps, in recent years we have asked ourselves how we should be able to adapt the consequences of this development.

We have taken our own medicine.

The whole process that led to AppCloud started with a realization that we are terribly analogous to a technology company.

There must then be opportunities to digitize the customer experience, standardize deliveries as well as integrate and automate deliveries in a consulting company?

Together we agreed to move ourselves into the cloud.

What did that mean?

Using design thinking as a method, we defined the customer experience we want customers ours must have with us. We then adapted our processes accordingly.

1. Integrate the design processes in our projects and automate the implementation of design in the front end. We have achieved this with a standardized design system in Figma with proven components and templates. Applications are designed as usual and we extract definitions using Figma's APIs.
2. Standardized front-end code in Flutter and React that is integrated with the design system in Figma and backend functionality in the cloud.
3. Shared infrastructure in the cloud that scales according to all the rules of the art and offers most of what you need in most applications.
4. A management interface used as an internal tool to configure projects and by customers to "self-service" themselves, follow development and application performance.

A new business model?

Although we paint a picture of a much changed consulting market, so the reality is probably, as usual, much more nuanced. There are still projects that require a large degree of tailoring and specially adapted solutions.

We think that the best compromise is to build on a scalable and shared platform and then grow into a solution with a greater degree of tailoring than the opposite.

If you think in this way, developing and operating an application does not have to be a big investment. You might rather subscribe to it?